Beckett and Seventeenth-Century Dutch and Flemish Art

Abstract

Knowlson focusses on Beckett's passion for seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art. This interest is examined in Beckett's correspondence and in his German diaries. He took detailed notes on R. H. Wilenski's and the art critic's perspective on painters such as Brouwer, Vermeer, Rembrandt (and the German painter Elsheimer) shaped his response. But Knowlson also suggests that Beckett's own approach to the theatre and his creation of certain stage tableaux and visual images may have been related to his close knowledge of the work of the Dutch and Flemish masters and to the account he found in Wilenski.